Stimulating book boxes

Is the current funding by the Australian federal government to increase the numbers of computers in schools sustainable? At what point will it be easier for parents to just supply mTechnology and computers to their school-aged children? We can already see some leverage in this direction with generous tax concessions for parents who purchase computers and internet access for their children.

I recall a question being asked at audience of the ACEC2010 conference this year, "how many of you have a 1:1 ratio of computers at home" .. most arms were held up. This was followed by "how many at your school?" .. practically all the arms come down.

It seems as if we have done a better job of winning the computer access battle at home than at our schools.

Once schools relied on class sets of text books in faculty offices. For many years this facilitated those students who had no money for a text book. Now we target funds to help these families buy books and the book boxes have nearly disappeared.

The BER funding has been a good stimulus and wake up call. In a few years, we should move onto the next stage. It is not that schools have fallen behind, it is just that there are other things we do much better.

My guess is that the crunch time will be 2015 when these major hardware rollouts start to crumble with age. It will then be more about proving on-ramps to the new cloud based systems than the model of the machines we use to drive upon them or the army of technicians we have trained to service these.